The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  Nothing worked.

  My father, by now a veteran of long, complicated ailments, decided to take matters into his own hands. Together, we made the rounds of Cairo’s top physicians, going from one to the other, one to the other, in search of an answer to what ailed me. Most of the doctors had been treating him for years, and knew him on a first-name basis. Ever since his fall shortly after I was born, my father had endured recurrent, painful flare-ups of his hip and leg. He’d never had the broken pin removed, and he limped noticeably.

  We made an odd pair as we toured the specialists’ offices—a tall, distinguished silver-haired gentleman whose right leg dragged, walking hand in hand with a diminutive girl with long dark hair and dark eyes, who shuffled ever so slightly on her left leg.

  My dad seemed at home with these elite physicians, whose offices were in the most upscale section of the city. Could you please examine my child? he asked each of them politely, almost obsequiously, as if they’d be doing him a favor by adding his slip of a daughter to their practice. As if he weren’t going to reward them with wads of large bills from his wallet.

  The Cairene medical establishment was frankly bewildered. The blood tests came back negative. X-rays taken of every part of my body revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The syrups and pills and injections seemed to have no lasting effect. The swelling in my leg refused to subside, my fever kept returning, and I had also developed a slight rash. I felt so tired that I didn’t want to play anymore, save with Pouspous. One doctor after another was unable to say what was wrong, beyond insisting that whatever ailed me was undoubtedly benign.

  At last, my sister located a physician known reverentially as “Le Professeur.” Suzette was certain the doctors my parents were consulting on my behalf were leading us down a primrose path. She was always at war with my father, persuaded he was letting me down, and my care had become the latest pretext for her rage.

  Le Professeur was a man of such renown that few ever bothered to use his name. He was revered by his patients, who included affluent Jews and Arabs, as well as whatever was left of the European community. His strange habit of always wearing white cotton gloves—to hide a skin condition, probably eczema—only added to his mystique, and to my fear of him.

  After closely examining me, in particular, the lump, he ventured a diagnosis: I had contracted a case of Cat Scratch Fever, la Maladie des Griffes du Chat. My father, no stranger to medical jargon, looked startled at the improbable-sounding verdict. What on earth was the Maladie des Griffes du Chat, he asked, and why had it taken so long to figure out what was wrong with me?

  The Professor grimly described an obscure disease, first isolated by a French scientist in the 1800s. Even now, he said, Cat Scratch Fever was known to only a handful of practitioners, and no doctors save the few who had studied in Paris and other great European medical centers were even vaguely familiar with the disease that was apparently attacking my entire immune system. The fever was thought to be caused by a scratch or bite from a cat that unleashed a painful inflammation of the lymph nodes. Children were the most vulnerable. No doubt, my cat had scratched me near my thigh, resulting in the unsightly cyst he called un ganglion.

  I didn’t understand much of what the doctor said—only that he seemed to be blaming my illness on Pouspous, whom I held in my arms much of the day and who ate with us at our dining room table. How could my cherished calico be to blame for the injections and blood drawings and legions of men in white coats who were constantly poking me? The uncertainty, the fear, the possibility that I was dangerously ill—it was all the cat’s fault.

  Having rendered a diagnosis, the Professor seemed far less certain of the cure. Cat Scratch Fever was still a medical mystery, he told us, and no one really understood it. While antibiotics were thought to help, there were no definitive remedies. The Professor could only express the hope that my Cat Scratch Fever would go away by itself.

  Children, he told my father as he patted my head, can heal almost by magic. They can seem deathly ill and then, overnight, be well again.

  “Dieu est grand,” my father exclaimed. He said that whenever he felt hopeful or frightened.

  The Professor nodded in agreement, but as if to hedge his bets and ours, he made us an offer. If I came back to his office once or twice a month, he would monitor me and determine whether I was showing any signs of improvement. He attempted a smile my way. I didn’t smile back; I kept looking at his white gloves.

  They made me anxious; would he ever take them off?

  Vowing to bring me back promptly in two weeks, my father took me by the hand and walked with me outside to the street where we hailed a taxi.

  He reached into his pockets and pulled out several pieces of candy in pretty silver wrappers. “Loulou, prend,” he said, handing me some bonbons, my reward, I suppose, for having endured the Professor’s relentless examination. My father never left the house without a supply of candy as well as the Lucky Strike cigarettes he kept in a silver case. Though he never lit up, he loved to give out the popular American cigarettes to friends and business associates.

  He asked the driver to take us to my favorite hangout in all of Cairo: Groppi’s. It was a surefire way, he knew, to cheer me up—as simple as letting me order a cup of pêche Melba. Sitting there with Dad, amid the splendor of Groppi’s pebbled garden, eating spoonful after spoonful of the delectable peach ice cream that came in a tall fluted glass, topped with whipped cream, I almost managed to forget the white-gloved doctor.

  The legendary patisserie was struggling to survive in the postcolonial world, even as many of its clients left the country. It still maintained two locations, its grand flagship store on Suleiman Pasha, and the one I liked even more, on Adly Pasha, because it had outdoor tables set within a pebbled garden. This symbol of foreign decadence had managed to forge a peace with the new revolutionary rulers, and it was whispered that Nasser and Sadat stopped by on occasion, if discreetly. The remaining expatriate community, the smattering of Jews and French and Italians who had somehow hung on, kept Groppi’s as their unofficial headquarters.

  My father could tell that I hadn’t liked the Professor, but he was still in a cheerful mood. Merely having a name for what ailed me was progress. For so many months, my family had lived in a state of uncertainty, wondering what was wrong with me. I had even overheard my older sister use the word tumor to describe the lump that refused to go away.

  Groppi’s of Cairo.

  I had no idea what a “tumor” was, but I guessed from the way Suzette said it that it was bad. Very bad.

  When we came home, my mother rushed out to ask what the latest specialist had said. Almost immediately, the order came down: I was to stay as far away as possible from Pouspous. “Tout ça, c’est à cause du chat,” my mother said crossly; It’s all because of the cat. At last she had an object for her rage, someone she could blame for my strange illness. I had the distinct sense that if she could, she’d simply boot out Pouspous and forbid me to ever play with her again. She did make me promise to stop embracing the cat or carrying her around in my arms, as I loved to do.

  I TURNED SIX IN the fall of 1962, and my family was in the throes of deciding whether to abandon a country they loved deeply but which no longer wanted them, or whether to tempt fate as well as the authorities by trying to stay.

  My father, who couldn’t fathom life outside of Egypt, opted as always for holding on. His health was so fragile, he couldn’t envision a lengthy voyage. Besides, his business was here. His synagogues were here. And though nearly every single member of his extended family—brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces and cousins too numerous to mention—had left, he still had friends and acquaintances in Cairo.

  But it was getting harder and harder for Dad to resist the pressure: Jews were leaving in droves.

  The convulsive departures were under way throughout the Middle East. Countries where Jews had lived harmoniously with their Arab neighbors for generations found their situations untenable. One af
ter the other, Jewish communities in Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, and, of course, Egypt dispersed. They left behind magnificent synagogues, schools, hospitals, and a way of life that had been, in many of these countries, often blissfully free of intolerance. World War II was fresh in everyone’s mind, as were the mistakes the German and European Jews had made in staying where they weren’t wanted. The world, still reckoning with the aftermath of the Holocaust, was determined not to risk another slaughter of Jews. Country after country opened its doors, and from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, nearly one million Oriental Jews scattered to the four winds. They left for Israel and America, as well as fanning out to Italy, England, Spain, France, even Australia and distant corners of Latin America.

  Alas, what no one could stop was the cultural Holocaust—the hundreds of synagogues shuttered for lack of attendance, the cemeteries looted of their headstones, the flourishing, Jewish-owned shops abandoned by their owners, the schools suddenly bereft of any students.

  We were witnessing the end of a way of life that many would look back on with a mixture of bitterness and longing.

  Some, like Dad, tried to stay put, unable to accept the finality of the situation.

  Our lives seemed to go on as before, but beneath the veneer of normalcy there was a feverish uncertainty. We didn’t know whether we’d be around another month or another year or another ten years. I was supposed to start second grade at the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk, but my father still hadn’t paid the tuition. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it. He still had means to pay for the best doctors, the best restaurants, and the best schools for his children. But it was such a tenuous time, and he was feeling squeezed by the Nasser regime. Most painful to my father was the evisceration of his beloved stock market. Nasser had nationalized one company after another, which made many of Dad’s holdings worthless.

  “On a tout perdu—on n’a plus rien,” he told my mother one afternoon; We have lost everything—we have nothing left. He was close to tears, especially since my mom had always disapproved of his passion for investing, and had felt that stocks were a risky proposition. Tears were very unusual for my father. My sister Suzette had a twenty-pound note on her; she went over and offered it to him. He refused.

  But he held off paying my tuition: did it make sense for me to begin a school year I might not be able to finish? As a result, the headmistress, quite sensibly, wouldn’t let me enroll. This distressed my mom to no end. Without telling Dad, my mother took me across the street for an interview at the Convent of the Sacred Hearts. One of the most respected schools in all of Egypt, it had, on occasion, admitted Jews, including my older sister.

  When my father found out what she had done, he was furious. He had always felt Sacred Hearts paved the way for Suzette’s rebellion; he wasn’t taking chances with me.

  “Jamais de la vie,” he said. Never.

  But my mother, who rarely asserted herself, was adamant. If Sacred Hearts was out of the question, then he would have to go at once—at once—to the Lycée Français and settle the debt to allow me to attend classes with the other children. The next day, I found myself once again enrolled at the Lycée de Bab-el-Louk, walking round and round the vast courtyard with my friends.

  My illness became a diversion from the larger pressures we faced. The burden of caring for a sick child and an ailing, much older husband, combined with the need to make a firm decision about whether and when to leave, was taking its toll on my mother. She was teary-eyed and fretful, wondering what would become of us, most especially “pauvre Loulou.” Since the onset of the fever, that is all she ever called me.

  Fueling the pressure was Suzette’s insistence that we abandon Egypt immediately. Her own friends had been leaving one by one, and these days, she had almost no one left to join her for a movie or an afternoon of shopping, other than the stray Muslim girls she had befriended. She was anxious for the next chapter of her life to begin. Because she was less emotionally vested, she also saw the dangers of staying put in Egypt more clearly than my father. But she couldn’t seem to persuade him, and her words fell on deaf ears.

  It was as if my dad believed the turmoil was only a passing phase. The political situation would settle down as it had so many times before. The fever in the streets would subside, and he’d be able to stay exactly where he was, enjoying the street life from his ground-floor window on Malaka Nazli.

  There was a truce only when the entire family came together to discuss what to do about me. They gathered in the living room, and talked as if I weren’t there, as if I couldn’t possibly understand what they were saying. I overheard them analyzing my illness and its dismal prognosis.

  Though my contacts with Pouspous had been cut back, the Cat Scratch Fever remained. I was still able to go to school, but I didn’t feel well. My symptoms receded and flared, receded and flared. My left leg was still swollen, the lump was still there, as large and hard and menacing as ever. I ran a fever that aspirin couldn’t control. I went regularly to see the Professor, or he came to Malaka Nazli. I dreaded the examination, especially his white gloves. Yet he was gentle enough as he searched for a sign that the strange swelling in my leg was going down, or that the fever was abating. After a couple of months, he declared himself at a loss.

  In what amounted to an admission of defeat, he suggested that perhaps I would be better off if seen by specialists in France or America.

  My father seemed shaken. The doctor who had offered a powerful incentive for us to stay now cited compelling grounds for us to go. We came home and relayed to the rest of the family the disheartening news. Cairo’s top specialist was urging us to seek help elsewhere. There were no more answers left in Egypt.

  Over the years my father had been ill, he was often told that doctors abroad were likely to have more options for him than in Cairo, which despite its pretensions to being a simulacra of Paris was still in many ways a Third World city. After his fall in 1958, Dad had been in perpetual pain. But as he improved, and learned to control the pain, in large part because of patient ministering by legions of Cairo’s leading physicians, the incentive to seek out other opinions waned, and with it, the incentive to leave.

  With my vexing malady, my father once again heard the siren song of the West.

  Both he and my mother longed to find the mythical bon docteur who would be more knowledgeable than his provincial Cairo colleagues. Surely, in Paris or Milan or New York, there would be a physician who could make me well again.

  AS HE WAVERED, MY father was reminded of the advice of our porter: it was time to pray.

  For that, my father favored the Kuttab, the little shul around the corner. Every morning for years, my dad would walk to the homelike structure, bringing supplies of coffee, tea, and sugar that a servant would prepare for the worshippers. He’d linger till the late morning, returning at the end of the day for evening services. There were times he stayed all night praying and bantering. The Kuttab was as much a social as a religious affair, almost like a private club where a group of prosperous Levantine businessmen who had known each other for decades put aside their worries and concentrated on praying as well as gossiping.

  Though cozy and intimate, it was also oddly snobbish and deeply fashion-conscious.

  My dad and the other synagogue elders made it a point to wear white, all white, to services each week. Indeed, they dressed as meticulously as they had in the 1940s, when standards were set by the British colonial officers. Even now, with the officers gone, and Egypt in its shabby and dejected postcolonial phase, the men of the Kuttab made sure that every stitch they had on was a dazzling shade of white, down to their shoes, though some favored white wingtips with a brown trim.

  I’d often accompany my dad to Saturday-morning services, and while women were relegated to their own section, I was allowed to sit with him and the other men, which I considered a wonderful honor, and one that I tried to earn. Instead of playing with the other children, I’d take a Hebrew praye
r book I didn’t know how to read and pretend to follow the liturgy. When I was restless, I’d wander outside, where groves of jasmine were in bloom. Their scent was so alluring, I’d pluck the delicate white flowers and make small garlands to bring back to the sanctuary and walk around, handing out blossoms to all the men to wear in their lapels.

  My favorite moment was when everyone stood to receive the priestly blessing. This solemn affair called for any man who was a cohen, a descendant of the ancient order of High Priests, to stand in front of the sanctuary and bless the congregation. All the male worshippers were expected to rise, drape the prayer shawl over their heads, and cast their eyes downward to the floor. My father insisted on having me at his side as he lifted the shawl over our heads to construct a makeshift tent. He would place his hand over my head, as if to confer an extra measure of priestly benediction.

  I never felt so safe as those moments beneath the white prayer shawl. There was nothing to fear, not even the ravages of Cat Scratch Fever.

  Still, because my illness continued to take its toll, my father decided to expand his repertoire of synagogues. His favorite, the Congregation of Love and Friendship, had closed a few years earlier after most of its members left for America. But there were still at least half a dozen functioning synagogues in our neighborhood, ranging from the intimate Kuttab to the more stately Temple Hanan, with its vaulted ceilings and spacious courtyard. Off we went one morning to Temple Hanan, the membership of which had dwindled, where he asked the rabbi to make a special prayer for me. Placing his hand over my head, the rabbi chanted to God to deliver me from Cat Scratch Fever. He then reached for some fragrant rose water in a silver container, and drizzled it all over my face and arms.